


the snow is melting

by dorypop



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Gen, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kid Fic, POV Andrew Minyard, POV David Wymack, POV Neil Josten, Parental David Wymack, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Snowed In, andrew has run away from home, as in the main characters are all kids, but don't expect a reason why because there's none, everyone is in a random hotel in the middle of a snow storm, they randomly regain their memories in the middle of the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:07:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24095548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorypop/pseuds/dorypop
Summary: Andrew has run away from his last foster family, Kevin is on a trip with his dad and Nathaniel and Mary are doing their thing. They all get trapped in a random hotel by a snow storm. Mary avoids Kevin, Kevin gets anxious, Wymack gets protective and Andrew gets roped into Exy talk. There's also a weird time travel/memory regain thingy in the middle in which they suddenly acquire the knowledge of what happened in the books, just because.
Comments: 24
Kudos: 57





	1. the snow is melting (Andrew)

This Kevin kid was okay, Andrew supposed—if you ignored his self-entitlement and his Exy obsession and, well, that stupid urge he had to speak about his parents all the time. It’s not that Andrew didn’t understand—if he had parents, he’d probably like to talk about them, too. And Andrew could maybe have made a bigger effort to ignore it—Kevin’s dad was a novel thing for him, and he seemed like an alright dad, and Kevin’s mum was, well, dead—, if only he could have escaped this place and spent a bit of his time outside. If only he was more certain the money he had stolen would last him more than two more nights in this damn hotel.

He hadn’t really planned on getting stuck here—that’s what made him more angry. He liked planning things. He liked controlling where he was going and where he was sleeping. He didn’t get the chance to do it very often, and that’s why he’d been quite content to start this journey. Almost excited, you could say, but Andrew didn’t dare hope too much, because when he did things started to go wrong.

Like this stupid snow storm.

They couldn’t leave the hotel, which was intended to be a little stopover, a bit of self-indulgence, to better get on with it after sleeping in a warm bed for one night.

It had already been two nights, and it looked like it was going to be at least two more.

The hotel had promised they wouldn’t charge the clients with the food they were consuming, but they hadn’t said anything about the room fares.

Moreover, the hotel was packed. Plenty of families with small children and more than one old-people couple, and just too much noise and not enough space to breathe.

Not many teens, though. Just that kid that travelled with his mother, who probably worked in an office according to her looks—Andrew had only seen them leave their room once, and that was probably only because his room, number 103, was just across the hall from theirs, 110. And, of course, Kevin.

“Do you play?” he’d asked, because Andrew had idly been staring at the TV on the lounge, where they were playing a rerun of a past Exy game from sunnier times. Andrew didn’t even know the names of the teams playing.

“Do you?” he’d asked back, and Kevin had sat down next to him and started parroting stats and rules and how proud he was his mom had actually invented the sport and his dad was a coach for a college team. It was exhausting to keep up with, but there was really nothing better to do there, so Andrew listened to maybe half of it.

Kevin didn’t need a lot of encouragement to keep talking, and he didn’t ask why Andrew was travelling alone—he had a story ready, the one he’d told the lady in the reception desk, about how he’d been waiting for his aunt to come get him when the storm hit, but he was perfectly okay with not retelling it more times than necessary. So, somehow, he found himself sitting in the cafeteria on Kevin’s table, with Kevin’s dad, who was indeed a coach but didn’t pester them with Exy talk or personal questions. Andrew quite liked him for that, so he ate past the knot he got in his belly every time he met a new person.

The other teen kid didn’t go down for dinner—Andrew wasn’t stalking him or anything, but it was weird and mildly interesting that they seemed to be hiding. Andrew knew about hiding, because he was kind of running away himself, but these two were a bit more proficient than him, it would seem.

His curiosity picked when he spotted the mom collecting a to-go tray from one of the waitresses. Were they planning to eat in their room, after spending the past two days also holed in there?

He must have shown something on his face, because Kevin stopped his chattering to follow his line of sight.

“No,” he said. Which was weird, and made not only Andrew but Kevin’s dad look at him.

“What,” Andrew said.

“Nothing.”

“Do you know her?” Kevin’s dad asked.

“No,” Kevin answered, but he was lying.

Andrew leaned closer to him in his chair.

“Does she work in an office?” he asked.

“No, she—I don’t know,” Kevin said. The woman left the cafeteria, without sparing a glance on their direction. Kevin looked down at his salad and started moving his lettuce around. He didn’t resume his talking.

“So, Andrew,” Kevin’s dad said, after a brief silence. Andrew looked at him, hoping his face was blank enough for him not to start asking questions. “What do you like to do on your free time?”

Being alone, Andrew thought. Reading, going for walks. Avoid thinking about doors that opened at night and hands that groped where they were not invited.

He shrugged.

“I suppose I could try this Exy thing,” he said, instead. It worked—Kevin looked up, bright as if Andrew had hung the angel on top of the Christmas tree.

* * *

The good thing about staying in the hotel, as opposed to taking short naps on buses or in bathroom stalls at train stations, was that the door locked. Sure, more people had the card that opened the door, but there was some law that prevented them from doing it without a good reason.

Not that Andrew trusted laws very much—there were also laws that were supposed to protect children and all that stuff—, but if anything the electronic device would keep a register of the times his door was opened and that was proof.

So he slept more soundly than he usually did, and woke up early and used his clear mind to study how successful he could be if he run away without paying the hotel bill, the moment the storm stopped.

He didn’t come up with much, but the TV on the cafeteria announced they didn’t expect for it to be safe to drive before the weekend, so he supposed he still had time to come up with a plan.

He could try to rob Kevin’s dad, he thought, when both he and Kevin sat again at his table.

Kevin looked ill.

“These’re fresh out of the oven,” Andrew said, taking another bit of his blueberry muffin.

“That’s sweet,” Kevin said, as if that was not the point.

“We’ll have some eggs, right, Kevin?” The dad intervened. Kevin nodded, and spent the whole time looking down at his plate.

That wouldn’t do, because it left Andrew to fetch for himself in a meaningless conversation with the dad that he really did not want to be having, so he stood up and left.

On the corridor to his room, he saw the door to 110 was half-closed. He waited by his room, with the card hovering just over the doorknob. After a full minute, the other door opened.

It was the kid.

He jumped a little when he discovered Andrew looking at him.

“Uh—hello,” he said, and his big, maybe brown eyes scanned the corridor in search of other people to greet before scrambling off to the stairs.

Andrew didn’t greet him back. He entered his room and locked the door after himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know how to describe this and even less how to tag it, so please if you think there's a tag missing or some way of wording what this is, don't hesitate to tell me! There's three chapters to this, and they're already written, so as I only have to briefly revise them I think I can post one a day until we're done.


	2. and the village is flooded (David)

Kevin was acting off and David didn’t know why.

It wasn’t the first time, of course—after that call from Evermore, in which the kid had stuttered and sniffled and possibly had a panic attack before managing to inform David that he was his biological dad and ask him to come get him, Kevin had had several days in which he acted _off_.

David had tried to make him feel comfortable, and he’d booked weekly appointments with this child shrink Bee had recommended, and he’d flushed all the alcohol in his cupboards after Kevin’s first attempt to drown it all to be able to sleep without nightmares.

He still didn’t know much about what had been going on in Evermore. It had been bad, yes. It had hurt Kevin and many other kids. It had been terrible enough to prompt Kevin calling a stranger and asking for help.

It made him furious and he very much wanted to punch several people for making his son so scared. Some days, he even pictured himself purchasing a gun and driving all the way to Evermore. Some days, Kevin got lost in his own head. Some days there was screaming, and some days they played Exy.

These days, they were sequestered in a hotel in the middle of a snowstorm.

Kevin had made a friend, which was a first since Evermore. He didn’t talk much about his time there, but he talked about Riko. David hadn’t decided yet if Riko was another victim or part of the problem or a convulted mixture of both. He didn’t want him closer than ten miles to Kevin.

Andrew was all right, if a bit private and perhaps too fond of sweets before midday, but Kevin seemed to like him well enough. That was a win in David’s eyes.

But Kevin was having an off day, and Andrew had noticed and left. Now David was alone to deal with it, and Kevin’s psychologist had only said to be patient and give him space when he called her.

David could do that, of course, but that was exactly what he’d done with Kayleigh and look where that had put them.

So he waited during breakfast, and waited when Kevin said he wanted to do homework, only to blankly stare at his textbook for fifty whole minutes before David snatched it away. He even waited when Kevin went for a walk around the hotel, and waited when he came back, perhaps even more distressed.

He sat down next to David on his couch on the lounge. David was eyeing a dated Exy magazine, and he decided he was done waiting when Kevin failed to brighten up at that, too.

“Hey,” he said. Kevin’s eyes were not quite empty—they looked frightened, which was ten times worse. “Can we talk?”

“Sure.”

“I know I promised I wouldn’t pry,” David begins, because he has to begin somewhere, “but I’d really appreciate it if you told me what’s wrong.”

“There’s—There’s nothing wrong, dad.” It was still strange to hear Kevin say it, perhaps because Kevin himself pronounced the word as if he was still tasting how it went.

David took a deep breath.

“Only there is. Just—I won’t get mad. I won’t do anything if you don’t want me to. I just want to understand. And maybe there’s something we can do to make you feel better?” He hated how it sounded like a question. He didn’t know what he was doing and Kevin was not stupid, so he must know too.

He wanted a scotch.

Kevin bit his lower lip. David nudged his sneaker with his shoe.

“I wasn’t expecting her to be here, that’s all,” Kevin whispered.

“Who’s she?” David asked, but he had an inkling they were talking about the mysterious woman they’d seen the previous night at dinner.

Kevin sighed, and all the strength he seemed to have been putting into building his façade left him—he crumbled into the couch and looked at his intertwined fingers.

“She’s just the mom of someone I know. We never saw him again, but he played really well. Nobody answered when we asked about him, but—I don’t know, I guess I wanted to meet him again. But she’s here! She looks a bit different, but it’s her. I just—I just wanted to know what’d happened to Nathaniel,” he finished, his voice getting smaller and smaller.

David wasn’t sure he was following, but he nodded anyway.

“Have you talked to her?”

Kevin hummed. He suddenly looked back at David, with that very misplaced tint of _hope_ his voice sometimes got when talking to him.

“She told me not to talk to her ever again, to forget I knew her! But I think Nathaniel might be here with her, because there was someone else in her room! But she said—”

“What?”

Kevin clammed up. He yanked at his hair, anxiously, and shook his head.

“Okay. Well, I’m sorry you couldn’t see your friend anymore, but if he’s with his mom he must be okay, right?”

Kevin opened his mouth but no sound came out. David didn’t think it was a good sign, but he didn’t know what else to say.

“Would you want to go see if Andrew’s up for a pool game or something?”

Kevin thought about it, but in the end he nodded. David stifled a sigh and patted him on the shoulder, before leading the way to the stairs.

“That’s their room,” Kevin muttered, before they got to Andrew’s room.

David didn’t understand what he meant, until he saw Kevin had once again gained that _off_ aura that meant he was on the verge of going far away from him.

“Do you really think your friend—Nathaniel—is in there?”

Kevin nodded with the kind of eagerness he usually reserved for Exy.

David only hesitated for half a second before changing their route. He stood in front of door 110.

“Go get Andrew, Kevin,” he said. Kevin didn’t look convinced, but he finally started walking again. David waited until a frowning Andrew had opened his door. “I’ll be there in a minute,” he assured the kids.

David knocked.

He knocked again when he failed to get an answer.

He couldn’t hear anything from inside the room, but they couldn’t have left the hotel and they hadn’t been in the lounge and it wasn’t time for lunch yet. Not that he’d seen the woman and a kid Kevin’s age eating at the cafeteria, now that he thought about it.

He knocked a third time, feeling the sharp looks Kevin and Andrew were throwing his way from Andrew’s threshold.

The door opened a slit.

“Who are you?” the woman asked. She had an accent, though David couldn’t quite place it.

He struggled to see more than the hostile eye that greeted him.

“Hi. David Wymack. I’m Kevin’s dad. You know Kevin, right? He’s told me a bit about you. I just wanted to make sure you and your son were okay, with the storm and all that.”

The eye blinked, perfectly unimpressed. David could hear water running somewhere.

“I don’t have a son,” she said. There was a pregnant silence, and then the woman looked ready to close the door.

David prepared his foot to prevent it, though he was perfectly aware it was possible she was telling the truth and Kevin was simply mistaking her for someone else. But Kevin was not a liar, and he was genuinely afraid, and if David had learnt something in the months he’d had Kevin was that Kevin’s reasons to be afraid were very valid reasons.

It happened really fast.

The lights went out, perhaps due to the storm still raging outside.

David had a weird feeling, like he was having a _déjà-vu_ but thirty times stronger. He _knew_ who this woman was, even if he’d never seen her before.

Someone gasped.

She pushed the door closed.

David intercepted her with his foot.

The lights came back.

He remembered.

He turned to look at Kevin, very ready to see his hand bloody and useless the way it’d been when Riko had broken it.

Kevin’s hand was fine. He was really young, younger than when David had originally met him.

Andrew was really young too. They rushed towards him.

He only remembered the door to room 110 was still open when he heard voices inside.

Kevin had been right, after all. There was somebody else in there.

That meant—

Andrew was faster than him. He opened the door and went inside.

They were greeted by a gun canon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only one more to go!
> 
> (Yes, now David remembers who Andrew and Neil are. No, there's no in-universe reason for that.)


	3. with children (Neil)

The running tap partially blocked the noise, but Mum had always had good ears and even better reflexes.

She brought out a gun.

Marcus—that wasn’t his name, but there wasn’t time to think about that—blinked, and the images finished settling in his head. Where there had been Mum pointing her gun at the kid from 103, suddenly there was Mum pointing her gun at _Andrew_.

Marcus ran, because that’s really the only thing he could do invariably right. Hands dripping wet and still with dye spots, he stood between Andrew and the gun.

He was reaching for the weapon before Mum’s voice froze him.

“Just what do you think you are doing?” Mum’s tone was harsh, cold, just like he remembered. It sent a pang of something like mourning directly to his stomach.

“Mum,” he said, reverting to her British accent, just like they did when they were alone and she called him Abram.

The gun still pointed at him, but Marcus—Neil?—fixed his eyes on Mum’s. He could see she was confused and wanted him to behave and do as he was told. But he could not, because she was very capable of shooting Andrew, so he didn’t waver.

“Step away,” she warned him. “Do not think I won’t shoot you.”

She wouldn’t, Neil knew. He didn’t move. He could hear someone breathing behind him.

“Mum, we’re fine,” he said. “It’s all right, they’re not—”

“You know them?” she asked.

Neil had only had time to see Andrew, but he did indeed _know_ him, so he nodded. He wanted to tell her all about the Foxes and Palmetto and everything else, but that wasn’t really a wise option when she was still holding that gun.

He took a deep breath.

“They’re not a danger to us,” he said. “They helped. A lot.”

Mum narrowed her eyes, and spent another minute intensely glaring before she lowered the gun.

Neil wanted to relax and turn around and maybe kiss Andrew if he said yes, but he only dared to steal a glance towards the still-running tap in the bathroom. Mum hastily turned it off.

“What did you do, Abram?” she asked, not louder than a whisper. It was a threat, because she’d meant it like that, but Neil didn’t feel threatened. She hadn’t called him Marcus, and that meant she was having this conversation with _him._

His legs felt stiff—Neil wanted to hop to shake them off. He stood still.

“Uncle Stuart asked about you,” he said, making a point of not allowing his voice to waver. He could almost smell the tension in Mum’s shoulders. “They all did—Lola and father and everyone else,” he added, ready to bolt to escape or to protect Andrew, if needed, if she raised her gun again. She didn’t move, didn’t even breathe, so Neil continued: “When I told Uncle Stuart you were dead, he was really upset.”

He could hear someone shuffling behind him, but he did not turn around to make them stop. Mum’s eyes were very hard when they set themselves to burn through him.

“What,” she said, slow and sharp and precise like a knife cutting Neil’s throat, “did you do, Nathaniel?”

Despite himself, he flinched. She moved, and he didn’t dare dodge her hands when they came to rest on his cheeks. Unscarred cheeks, still sensitive to her touch, to the cold barrel of the gun she was still holding, even while she held him. She was looking at him, searching for the truth, as she did when he’d been out with other kids and she smelled a lie in the excuses he gave her. She always found a lie, even when Neil hadn’t been lying.

“Madam—” a man said.

Mum’s eyes darted away from Neil’s face, only to return with a deeper frown.

“I did what I had to,” he whispered, when the pressure from her fingers was starting to hurt, less firm than he would’ve liked because, after everything, he still didn’t like to disappoint her.

But she would be disappointed no matter what, especially if she knew what Neil had been up to during his college freshman year. It was better to get over it quickly.

Mum hadn’t found what she was hoping to in his face—she was still looking at him as if she didn’t know him. Which was probably true, because she didn’t know Neil Josten.

And he was Neil Josten. And would forever be.

He raised his wet hands to cover Mum’s, and gently released his face from her hold.

He turned around—Andrew stood closer, face blank, a pinch of anxiety in the minute curving of his eyebrow. Behind him, Kevin and Coach, more clearly distressed.

He swallowed, suddenly out of words, and angled himself so his back was to the wall and not to either Mum or them.

“Your hair looks like dry reed,” Andrew said. Neil inspected a lock, but the dye was drying as it should and it looked _good_.

“It’s fine,” he said, just for the sake of being antagonistic. He glanced at Mum, who did not normally approve of him talking to other people so freely, but Mum just secured the lock in the gun and very carefully sat down on the bench by the window.

“Thank God,” Kevin said. He was probably standing only because Coach kept a hand secure on his shoulder.

“Hi, Coach,” Neil said, earning a small smile that relaxed a bit the knot in his stomach. “This is my mom,” he added, reverting without noticing to his neutral American accent.

“So I gathered,” Coach nodded.

“Mom, this is Andrew, and you know Kevin, and this is Coach Wymack.”

“Kevin Day’s _father_ , Nathaniel? Really?”

“I’d say, _Mary_ ,” Andrew said, earning a very displeased glare from Mum that he promptly retuned, “you’ll want to savour whatever you’re feeling right now. It only gets worse,” he promised, with a curl of his lips that wasn’t quite a smile and that did _things_ to Neil’s belly.

He cleared his throat.

“Well, we can leave that for when we’ve decided what we’re going to do, right?”

“What do you mean?” Kevin asked, finally gathering enough bravery to take a step forward. “We’re still trapped by the snow.”

“We’ll leave right after,” Mum sentenced, and once upon a time that had would have meant Marcus was bound to disappear and someone else would come after.

He shook his head.

“We have to call Uncle Stuart.”

“No,” Mum said, standing up again.

“Yes,” Neil said, looking up at her.

“We have to get Aaron, too,” Andrew interjected.

“There’s no _we_ in here, lad,” Mum said, the gun dangling from her hand.

“ _We_ ,” Coach began, “could start by taking lunch, and talking about it before we make any decissions. I can also talk to some people and see how we proceed in hiding you two,” he said. It sounded like a plan.

Mum was not at all convinced, but Neil managed to explain briefly to her how things had turned out with the FBI the first time around, while Kevin procured food. She wasn’t convinced either when Neil told her about his deal with the Moriyamas, but that was probably because she strongly disapproved of him playing Exy.

Andrew came with him when he finally went to the bathroom to wash his hands. They left the door open because Neil didn’t trust Mum alone in a room with Coach. Or Coach with Mum, if it made any difference.

“Neil,” Andrew said.

“Andrew.”

“This is not a dream.”

Neil nodded. “We’ll make it right this time.”

Andrew tilted his head, as if waiting for Neil to start questioning both their sanities, because after all these kind of things _just didn’t happen_. But Neil didn’t have enough space in his mind to start asking metaphysical questions.

He wiped his hands, all the residual dye gone through the drain.

“Yes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter titles come from a haiku by Kobayashi Issa: the snow is melting / and the village is flooded/ with children (translated by Robert Hass).
> 
> This is a standalone fic, and I’m not really planning on writing a sequel, but any sequel plot could be summarized by the fact that foresight is really helpful and they probably manage to save a lot of people and these five have a really fun road trip. You can hit me on [ tumblr](https://hklnvgl.tumblr.com/) for headcanons or comments or whatever you like!


End file.
